we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to
see images.... We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we’re sitting in,
forgetting it’s lunchtime or time to go to work. We create, with minor and
for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the
writer worked out in his mind... and captured in language so that other
human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream the
dream again.Some virtuoso stylists, Gardner suggests, are able to combine the best of
both worlds, using a brilliant prose style and richly embroidered lan-
guage to evoke vivid characters and large human situations, among
whom he names Proust, the later Henry James, and Faulkner. Of
Shakespeare, that incomparable master of language, Gardner argues that
although he employs brilliant language, Shakespeare always “fits lan-
guage to its speaker and occasion,” making his poetic language ulti-
mately “subservient to character and plot.”
With Shakespeare, however, we leave the realm of fiction and enter the
new realm of verse, where a different set of rules prevails. In
Shakespearean verse drama, as in the classical Greek analyzed by
Aristotle, plot is paramount. But being poetry, plot and language have a
different relation. To explore this new realm more closely, let’s put aside
verse drama and narrow our attention to lyric poetry. For though narrative
elements exist in varying degrees in lyric poems, verse presents a far more
tangled situation than prose fiction or verse drama. Lyric poems organize
time differently than prose, and at finer scales. In place of narrative, argu-
ment often serves as the poem’s large-scale organizing scheme, as in the
poems of Donne or Marvell. To the rhythms of syntax, which prose pos-
sesses, poetry adds another unit of rhythm: lines. Together, the interacting
rhythms of syntax and line generate an intersecting wave pattern within
the poem’s middle-level time scale. Meter adds yet another, finer-scaled
rhythm within the line, at the level of syllables.
All writing contains a large element of feedback as writers listen to
the sounds and rhythms their words make and adjust their writing in
response. Writing in lines and meter greatly increases this feedback
since the poet has to listen to and arrange words at multiple levels to
make the line cohere. In addition, a line in meter has a holistic integrity
independent of its semantic meaning. Readers literally use a different
part of the brain to recognize metrical patterns. As in prose, the seman-
tic meaning of a line of verse is decoded primarily in the linguistic pro-
cessing areas of the left brain; but meter is perceived in the
pattern-recognition areas of the right. Consequently, reading a line of156 Paul Lake